How To Build Stronger Titles For Improved Retention, Better Results

After pouring your heart out into a blog post, coming up with a post title to reflect what you've written about can be a challenge.  First impressions are so important; you have milliseconds to grab someone's attention and keep it for a bit. 

When a reader shares a post to social media, browses your blog's newsletter, or searches your blog for a specific topic, the headline is what they see first. Don't skimp on coming up with an effective title.

Now, there's help! Check out Headline Analyzer from CoSchedule.

Enter your title and click the "Analyze Now" button.  You will see a pop-up asking for your name, email, and website but we promise it's free.

We'll use this article as an example. Originally, the title of this post was going to be "Grab Your Readers With A Captivating Post Title." How did it work out? Not so well.

We can do better than that.  This headline type is classified as "Generic" with not enough action involved to make readers want to share this headline with others. You want to trigger an emotional response and curiosity which makes the person to want to click your headline to read more. Using effective keywords can help rank your post in search results. 

At the same time, don't overshare and make your title too long as that is not effective for SEO purposes either. Remember, milliseconds!  Headlines 55 characters, or 6 words, long tend to earn the highest number of click-throughs but there is a little room for leeway. 

Consider the types of words you're including in your title. Common words take up 20-30% of a headline while Uncommon take up 10-20% and Emotional 10-15%. There should be at least one Power word in your headline. 

Following the recommendations, and some trial and error, the headline changed to "How To Build Stronger Titles For Improved Retention, Better Results".  How did this work out?

Better! We now have a clear intention with a "How To" headline where the reader will gain a better understanding of what they'll read from the title alone. We don't have "uncommon" words in the title due to length but some examples of uncommon words include "more, actually, right, awesome, actually."

What have you found is most effective in creating a strong post title?

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